Jinx Jones is out there. Four or five nights a week, the great guitar player with the immaculate pompadour can be found at various Bay Area venues, working the stage, doing his thing. The Colorado native came up serving as a sideman to rock ’n’ roll royalty, playing with the likes of Chuck Berry and Solomon Burke. He has a few outfits of his own, including the Jazzabilly All-Stars and the KingTones. Then there was the time Jones was called in to provide the musical pyrotechnics for En Vogue’s hit “Free Your Mind.” We spoke with him at his San Francisco home.

A: It’s a little of everything. The Riptide is out in the Outer Sunset, and it has a really good following in that area. They’re very selective about who performs there. Someone going there knows they’re going to have certain standards of excellence and creativity. I also play North Beach a lot, and that’s where you see a lot of tourists. They want to experience the America that they’ve envisioned. We seem to fit that description for them.

Q: You spent a few years performing with Chuck Berry. What do you remember most about him?

A: Chuck Berry is an interesting guy to work with. You’ve probably heard a lot of the stories. They’re all pretty much true.

Q: Was he difficult?

A: The funny thing is before the first time I played with him, I got all his records and learned all the songs because I knew there wasn’t going to be any rehearsal, which was futile. Because when he performed, none of the songs were in the same key or anything.

Q: What keeps you interested in rockabilly music?

A: It’s fun, that’s first and foremost. I don’t put it in the same category a person who runs a record store would. For me rockabilly music is kind of like an amalgam of really cool forms of American music — Western swing rhythms, R&B vocals and jazzy guitar licks. It adds together a lot of ingredients I really like.

Q: A lot of people don’t know you played on those big En Vogue hits. How did that happen?

A: It was really cool. The night we cut “Free Your Mind,” which I played all of the instruments on except drums, it was the one time that I thought that someday there will be a compilation album of the greatest hits of the 1990s and that song will be on that record. I could just tell.